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If I have to myself limit to one advice: write content for your users, not for search engines. Compelling (and unique) content will keep them coming back, will increase time on site & lower your bounce rate, reinforce your brand, ...etc.
For the technical part - you can take the Moz beginner's guide as a good guideline.
In both cases you will just see Facebook as referrer - if you want to track more in detail you will have to add a tracking parameter to your links.
Dirk
Hi
In my experience there is a certain latency with the links shown in Webmastertools, I has the tendency to continue to show links, even after they have been removed (we used to have a partnership with a large telco - and had 1.5mio links coming from them - when the partnership ended it took several months before they disappeard in WMT). If you are unable to find these links using the tools you mentioned I wouldn't worry about them.
rgds,
Dirk
Hi Eric,
There are some similar questions regarding the topic on the forum (unfortunately the search function Moz is not really best in class) - check also these questions:
http://moz.com/community/q/google-s-mobile-friendly-update-how-significant-is-the-impact-for-us
http://moz.com/community/q/google-mobile-algorithm-update
Basically, nobody knows what the effect is going to be. Most of the stuff I read about it seem to indicate that there will be no impact for desktop, but again we don't know. Google seems to indicate that it will have a big impact, so if you have a lot of mobile traffic, you risk to loose a lot.
The mobile friendly check is done is on page not site level - so you could try to work on your most important (mobile) landing pages and make them responsive / adapted for mobile. It doesn't really have to be state of the art - the goal is that the page passes the mobile friendly test - you can always improve later on.
rgds
Dirk
If it's just design that changes it will normally have no negative impact on your site - if you do a good job it could even improve your rankings if user experience improves (increase time/visit, time/page & lower bounce rate)
If it has impact on your site structure I would do as ofw12387 : deploy a test site & use Screaming Frog to do a full audit:
If you have traffic on image search - also check that the position & the names of the images are not changing.
Good luck with the redesign,
Dirk
The issue is the link in the contact info - www.oorboo.com
If you look in the source:
=> this is a relative link - so when you click on it the www.oorbo.com will be added to the current url.
Make it absolute & the issue is solved:
Dirk
Michael,
It's the same - just the wording is different. For some reasons Analytics prefers to use sessions instead of visits.
rgds,
Dirk
If your only goal is to have these indexed faster, you can remove it - the xml sitemap is already doing that (not exactly faster, but helping Google to discover the url's of your site) - see also http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2008/01/sitemaps-faqs.html
It can be useful for users to have an HTML sitemap - but than you would have to structure the sitemap a little bit more, not just present a plain list of links.
rgds,
Dirk
You could point a canonical to the original source (in fact that is the way Google prefers it). It's a great solution if it's you who's syndicating the content. However, if you would do that, you would loose any opportunity to get ranked on that content.
Googles view: (source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en).
"Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results."
The big problem with duplicate content across different domains is that it's up to google to decide which site is going to be displayed. This could be the site which is syndicating the content, but it could also be a site which has the highest authority.
In your case - if possible I would try to enrich the content you syndicate with content from other sources. Examples could be interesting stats on the neighbourhood like avg. age, income, nearby schools, number of house sold & average price...etc or other types of content that might interest potential buyers. This way your content becomes more unique and probably more interesting (and engaging) for your visitors (and for Google)
Hope this helps,
Dirk
Peter,
It depends.
If you don't get a lot of traffic from image search there is no need to do anything special.
If you are receiving a lot of traffic you basically have two options
redirect the images to the new location (if this is easy to do)
alternative would be to keep the images in the old location & put them in the new location as well. As you update the sitemap & redirect the url's Google will after a while update the index for image search & get the new location. As long the index is not updated, your 'old' images will still appear in image seach, when people click on the link they will however be redirected to your new page (as the page containing them is redirected). In my experience - the update frequency of the image index is lower than the normal search index.
I applied this strategy on 2 migrations of sites with 90% of search traffic = image & it proofed quite successful.
Hope this helps - let me know if you have additional questions,
rgds,
Dirk
It will probably help if you delete the following line from your robots.txt file:
User-Agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /
Dirk
PS You also block /js/ for all bots - Google doesn't really recommend that
I don't think they do it on a fixed day - I receive crawl reports for my different sites on different days. It probably depends on the day you first scheduled your campaign; ex. you requested first crawl on Tuesday - you will probably receive your crawls every Tuesday
Hi,
I would try fetching these pages like Google, or use a tool like http://web-sniffer.net/ to check these pages. If you just do a visual inspection, it's quite possible that you are seeing the correct the page, but that the header returns a 404 instead. Check also https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/181708?hl=en.
If they are really properly redirected, you can mark them as fixed in WMT to make them disappear. If not it's no use deleting them as they will reappear a few days later.
rgds,
Dirk
Hi Jennifer,
Migration to https has certain risks (like any other migration of your site). Without the actual url it's difficult to asses what's wrong with the site.
1. You can check here if the SSL was properly implemented: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/
2. There is an interesting article on the technical migration on the site of Yoast (https://yoast.com/move-website-https-ssl/) - and about the potential SEO impacts here: http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl - even if you have already migrated you could check the different steps & check if you have skipped one.
3. Try crawling the site with Screaming Frog - it has a tab Protocol that can show you if all pages are on https or if some are missing. You can also check if all your internal links are updated to the https version.
4. I guess you have created a WMT for https version of your site - check if specific errors are listed.
5. Check pagespeed with google page speed analyser & webpagetest.org - check your scores. It possible that adding the https also made your site slower.
6. Sample pages in different browsers - do you get security warnings when visiting pages. These messages can really frighten your visitors, and have impact on stats like bounce rate & avg. visit duration, and as result have an impact on your rankings
7. Check vital stats in Analytics - like bounce rate, pages/visit, avg visit duration, avg time on page... - did you see major changes after migration. Also check if you see an increase in 404 pages.
Hope this helps in solving your problem,
Dirk
Hi,
2 things can have an impact on the underlying pages:
1. Your navigation is appearing on all pages - so the pages that are linked to from the navigation will get internal links from all the other pages of your site.
While internal links are less important than external ones, they still play a role in telling Google how important the pages are (=more links is more important). Removing important pages from the navigation will result in a (substantial) lower amount of internal links to these pages
2. If the pages that were previously in the navigation are not linked to from the home page they will be 1 click further away from your homepage (same goes for the underlying pages). How deeper the content is in your site, the less likely it is that it will rank. This might have an impact as well.
So yes, it can have an impact. On the other hand - you also have to keep your visitors in mind. If you had one of these huge dropdown menus before with lots of different links, and now a very clean and logical navigation, it could have a positive impact on the user experience. This would be reflected by things like time on site, bounce rate,...etc and would have a positive effect on rankings.
Just my 2 cents,
Dirk
Hi,
I fear that it's not going to work for the Arabic version. In each case I am certain that the on page grader of Moz is unable to deal with non-latin characters - see also the answer from Matt Roney on this question: http://moz.com/community/q/use-of-moz-with-non-latin-characters
rgds,
Dirk
You might want to check this thread https://moz.com/community/q/804-https-ssl-error - there are possible solutions mentioned in the answers if you scroll towards the bottom of the page
Basically Moz has issues crawling https sites using SNI - which is often use by Cloud Flare (and some other hosts)
"Our current crawl libraries do not support SNI which is typically what is enabled by default by Cloud Flare. Our engineering team is still investigating expanding our libraries but an ETA is not available quite yet."
As far as I know this issues hasn't been solved yet. If the SNI is not the issue - you might want to contact Moz directly (help@moz.com) to take a look at your specific issue.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
Agree with Ryan - if you want to make changes - better make the image name a descriptive one.
Also, take care if you get search traffic from image search - changing the name of your images could cause a big negative impact on your traffic. In my experience the image index is updated slower than the normal index - so if 2554.jpg is indexed and you change it to 6842.jpg or even better red-ford-truck.jpg the image in the result will return a 404 and be replaced by the same image from another site (if it's a stock photo) or dropped from the results. Better to keep the old image in the initial location until the index is updated
rgds
Dirk
Hi,
There is an alternative solution but it would require more work on your side.
The problem with your current situation is that you create thousands of low value pages with little added value (which Google doesn't really like: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-results-in-search-results/) and then you heavily promote these low quality pages by point hundreds of links to them. Principal message to Google - these low quality pages are my most important ones.
What you could do is to check the search pages which are generating traffic (ex. take the top 100) and create "real" pages for them. If we take the example you give: http://oursite.com/Search.html?text=Kitten - rather than having a generic search page with little added value you create a real page with some added value content (yoursite.com/topics/kitten) with links to your most important pages on the subject. As an example of how such a page could look like: http://dogtime.com/dog-breeds/german-shepherd-dog - this page is like a kind of "home" - containing a definition + links to the most important related articles on the subject. If these kinds of pages already exist on your site then of course no need to create them.
On the related search pages you then put a canonical url pointing to this page. You also update the links to the search page to the "real" added value page. This way you start promoting new value added content with minimal risk of loosing your current positions & remove the old low value pages from the index. It can take some time however before you see a positive effect.
For the search request where it's not possible to create a version with add value - you point the canonical to the generic search page (or your homepage) and remove all the links to these pages.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
Hi Ruben,
You could translate the full site or only part of it (focussing on the most important parts). Only putting a translated homepage is an option but will not help you much in terms of SEO & isn't really great for user experience either.
You shouldn't worry about duplicate content if you translate the content to Spanish (and certainly don't put canonicals to the English version). In multilingual countries (like mine) it's more or less the standard approach. If you want to make it very obvious for Google (and the other search engines) you can use the hreflang tags. Check here for more info https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en or here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag
Personally I wouldn't put the Spanish version on a brand new domain - as it implicates that you'll have to build your reputation almost from scratch - rather use a folder on your main domain (domain.com/es/ ) - this way the Spanish pages will benefit from the reputation of your current site. You could use the Spanish domain as vanity url & redirect it to the Spanish version
Would also add a link on each page - pointing to the version of that page in the other language or (if only partially translated) - to the homepage of the other language.
If you have questions let me know.
Dirk